In Syria, Bashar Assad is trying
to bring his enemies to heel by blocking humanitarian convoys to desperate
civilians living in besieged towns. The policy is called “starve
or kneel,” and it is openly supported by Hezbollah and tacitly by Iran,
which has deployed its elite Quds Force to aid Mr. Assad’s war effort.

So what better time for
right-thinking liberals to ask: “Is Iran really so evil?”

That’s the title of a revealing essay
in Politico by Stephen Kinzer, a former New
York Times reporter now at Brown University. “The demonization of Iran is
arguably the most bizarre and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,”
Mr. Kinzer begins. “Americans view Iran not simply as a country with interests
that sometimes conflict with ours but as a relentless font of evil.”

Mr. Kinzer’s essay was published
Sunday, as sanctions were lifted on Tehran and four of America’s hostages came
home after lengthy imprisonments. The Obama administration publicly insists that
the nuclear deal does not mean the U.S. should take a benign view of Iran, but
the more enthusiastic backers of the agreement think otherwise. “Our
perception of Iran as a threat to vital American interests is increasingly
disconnected from reality,” Mr. Kinzer writes. “Events of the past week may
slowly begin to erode the impulse that leads Americans to believe patriotism
requires us to hate Iran.”

What a weird thought. My own
patriotism has never been touched one way or another by my views of Iran. Nor do
I hate Iran—if by “Iran” one means the millions of people who marched
alongside Neda Agha-Soltan when she was gunned
down by regime thugs in the 2009 Green Revolution, or the fellow travelers
of Hashem Shaabani, the Arab-Iranian poet executed two years ago for “waging
war on God,” or the thousands of candidates who are routinely barred from
running for Parliament for being insufficiently loyal to the Supreme Leader.

This is the Iran that liberals
like Mr. Kinzer ought to support, not the theocratic usurpers who claim to speak
in Iran’s name while stepping on Iranian necks. But we are long past the day
when a liberal U.S. foreign policy meant shaping our interests around our
values—not the other way around—much less supporting the liberal aspirations
of people everywhere, especially if they live in anti-American dictatorships.

Today’s liberal foreign policy,
to adapt Churchill, is appeasement wrapped in realism inside moral equivalency.
When it comes to Iran policy, that means believing that we have sinned at least
as much against the Iranians as they have sinned against us; that our
national-security interests require us to come to terms with the Iranians; and
that the best way to allay the suspicions—and, over time, diminish the
influence—of Iranian hard-liners is by engaging the moderates ever more
closely and demonstrating ever-greater diplomatic flexibility.

That’s a neat theory, proved
wrong by experience at every turn. The Carter administration hailed the
Ayatollah Khomeini as “a saint.” Our embassy was seized. Ronald Reagan sent
Khomeini a birthday cake, along with secret arms, to facilitate the release of
hostages in Lebanon. A few hostages were released, while others were taken in
their place. The world welcomed the election of “moderate” President
Mohammad Khatami in 1997. Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities were exposed
during his second term.

In 2009, on the eve of
presidential elections, the New York Times’s Roger Cohen celebrated “the
vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society” that he had found on his
visits to Tehran. “The equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic,” he
wrote. After the election, he ran for his life from the terror of the same
street militia that had murdered Agha-Soltan.

Now we’re supposed to believe
that the change Mr. Cohen and others had hoped for has finally arrived. The
proof, supposedly, is that the regime has so far kept to its nuclear promises
(in exchange for a $100 billion windfall), that it swiftly released U.S. sailors
(after scoring a small propaganda coup), and that it let the other hostages go
(though only after very nearly taking the wife and mother of one of those
hostages in his turn, and then after an additional $1.7 billion reward from the
U.S.).

Are these signs of a
new-and-improved regime? Or merely one that is again being given good reasons to
believe that it can always extract a bribe for its bad behavior? The notion of
moral hazard, fundamental to economics, has a foreign-policy dimension, too. Any
country that believes it will never be made to pay the price for the risks it
takes will take ever-greater risks. It’s bad enough when the country in
question is Greece. This is Iran.

Iran will become a “normal”
country only when it ceases to be an Islamic Republic. In the meantime, the only
question is how far we are prepared to abase ourselves in our quest to normalize
it.